Help Us Say Farewell to Newspaper Navigator!

The Library will retire the Newspaper Navigator application on April 21st, 2025. Created by Benjamin Charles Germain Lee while he was in service as a Library of Congress Innovator in Residence, the application has received over 174,000 visitors representing tens of thousands of research experiences.

Ben’s project was the first in-house machine learning application developed at the Library. It used machine learning techniques to extract visual content from over 16 million pages of digitized American newspapers in the Chronicling America collection. Researchers could browse and discover images from the collection by search term and further refine their searches by visual similarity.

While the time has come to bid this experimental application goodbye, the Library continues to learn from and build on this work. We know how much Newspaper Navigator has meant to us, and we would love to hear from past users about their experiences with Newspaper Navigator. Please share your story with us in the comment section below.

As part of our goodbye celebrations, Ben Lee had some parting thoughts around the application, its usage and the range of projects and use cases it has supported over the years.

“When I began Newspaper Navigator over five years ago, my goal was to reimagine search and discovery for the incredibly varied and rich visual culture found within the millions of newspaper pages within Chronicling America. Since then, the resulting Newspaper Navigator dataset has supported millions of computational queries, and the search application has supported tens of thousands of individual user experiences.”

He added, “I have been amazed by the inventive ways that the public has used Newspaper Navigator. Teachers have used the project with students in the classroom to teach subjects as far-ranging as social studies and computer science; genealogists have utilized the project to find photos of family members; scholars have used the dataset to study photographs and editorial cartoons, as well as advance research within AI. It has been a highlight of my career to work so closely with LC Labs, Serials, and IT Design & Development at the Library of Congress. It was only with these collaborators that Newspaper Navigator was possible, and I am forever grateful that we were able to reach so many members of the American public.”

If you’re curious to learn about the impacts of the application and the relationship between the Chronicling America collection and the Newspaper Navigator data, the following white papers offer a deep dive: Compounded Meditation: A Data Archaeology of the Newspaper Navigator Dataset and The Newspaper Navigator Dataset: Extracting and Analyzing Visual Content from 16 Million Historic Newspaper Pages in Chronicling America. While the application itself will be retiring, we aim to make the Newspaper Navigator datasets publicly available and free to use for future projects, experiments and ideas.

For more information about the application, please visit the Newspaper Navigator page on the LC Labs website and continue to stay tuned to the Signal for more updates.